discordance and symmetry
by Aiko Isari
Summary: (World 2/Cyber Sleuth) There is a rumor on the air, that of a bird with magic in their bones, one that can heal any wound. Akira believes none of it, of course. But when his father's wounds fester and pus, the young prince journeys to find it, and he finds none of what he expected at all.
1. Chapter 1

_Warning for illness, past slavery and evidence of slavery, magic._

* * *

Chapter One - An Awful Song

There was no doubt in young Akira's mind that his father had once kept slaves.

It was not enough to say: well, he doesn't do it anymore, he pays them now, because it was all in the walls, in the sometimes stony silence between his mother and father. It was in the way eyes flicker downward every day at the sight of him. It's in the way everyone wears too nice of clothes.

Still, Akira didn't think on it too much. Because it really has nothing to do with him these days. He's an ordinary soldier in training, and all the servants are paid. It should be long over.

And yet his father had fallen ill once again, as he had when he had kept slaves.

He heard the coughs in the nightly silence of the palace.

Like now.

Great, awful hacking sounds reached through his shut window. Akira threw one of many pillows over his head but all the silence did was make his palms sweat and him scrunch his eyes up in dismay.

As prince, if he wanted, he could go and demand entry in the room, demand something to stifle the sound. Others had whispered that he should. However, he could not. He could not see the sagging skin and sunken eyes on paper again. The last time had made him throw up in the hallway, shameful as it was.

Eventually, the coughing will die down, he knows. It always does. For a few hours, days, maybe a week, his father will seem better than this. His father will command again. And then he'll fall il and the cycle will continue until his father simply just… can't. And then he'll be king.

The very thought chills his blood.

Eventually, Akira made himself sleep. The fairy tales sitting at his bedside table are no help tonight, it seems.

* * *

His father had kept slaves, both human and inhuman. He'd never met the inhuman ones as a child, but the human ones still had marks on their wrists. He had once tried to bandage one apparently. He remembered none of this.

Even his weapons master, even the trainer of Knights was a former slave.

Akira lowered his blade, watching the man's broad chest heave air. He changed the angle, preparing to step forward. Then, with another pause, he did so, lifting the weapon as it clanged with the raised sword. It caught in the hilt and Akira grit his teeth, making to push it back up. However, the simple parry unseated his footing, making him stumble until the heavy hilt his him square in the gut.

Akira groaned at the pain to his bottom and legs. "Dead, I know," he managed to wheeze. "Couldn't tell by my stomach."

"You'd be feeling much less if I had stabbed you, boy." The elder settled in his stance once more. "You're lucky we're at peace, thanks go to your father."

 _Thanks go to the cursed and dying._

"Do you thank him because you're paid to?" Akira blurted out before he could stop himself, tugging at his red hair for lack of anywhere to apply himself.

The man paused, looking at him like he wasn't the crown prince of Directory. Needless to say, like he did his own son. Then Zudokorn sighed low into his beard. "Vandar is given thanks for his actions of the present and curses from the past, even from you."

 _As you being here is an action._

Akira shook his head. "Right." He didn't want to think about that, especially now at the renewed coughing sound filtering through the windows left open for ventilation.

"Can we continue?" he decided to ask, because that train of thought was not somewhere he needed to go or wanted to be near.

* * *

"You ever hear the song of the nightingale?"

Akira fed his patamon and listened to Joy-Joy, required to be friends with him and friends with him anyway.

"The what?"

The girl laughed, laughed like bells and wore the name that suited her. "I forgot, you're so young. There once was a bird trapped in a cage, with such magic and wonder in its voice it was said to grant wishes." Her hair buns bounced as she spun upon the edge of the pond. "Your father was such a conqueror at the time, and he decided then, like all things, he had to have it. So he hunted and hunted and caged the tiny creature, the stories say, and made it sing. It sang on until it grew weak with loneliness and with no wind in its heart."

She looked at him, brown eyes sparkling like they were the only crystal in a puddle of mud. "They say the wilting bird broke his heart and he set him free. The song of the nightingale set us all free. And it took wing and never returned."

Joy-Joy took this moment to bounce upon the top of the water, a talent only she had that, as a Selkie's child, neither he nor Bertran could imitate. "But your father treasured the song, and so he made a music box to play it for him." She frowned now, looking towards the roof of the only second story building in the complex. "And perhaps it's supposed to save him."

"Magic doesn't save anyone." Akira threw a rock that dodged Joy-Joy's nimble legs. "Just gets them into trouble." Even now, they ran past the two children with spellbooks in hand, not even hiding that they were going to fail.

"Mayhap." Joy-Joy agreed, silver chains clanking over her bracelets. Deramon squawks at her in annoyance. "But it exists and we live with it."

Akira scowled. That was true. "Why didn't the nightingale come back?"

Joy-Joy shrugged. "Because he was a bird who needed to go back to his nest. That's my guess, anyway. Maybe there were other nightingales who needed him. They live so far away now, so far from the precious king. Why?"

"Because everyone returned but them." Even her, whose people descended from the legendary warriors who had rebelled against heaven. They had been ruined by his father, everyone was saying now. "I… I don't think my dad deserves this. If there's some way to fix it-" If there's some way to leave "Then surely I can go look right?"

Joy-Joy looked at him sadly, then fondly. "Then we'll go with you, of course. Or I will. Bertran will try to stop you, but who needs him?"

"You'll get in trouble." He swallowed his guilt because he had known the second he had said something she would go with him because they were friends. Or because she was his to look after. Or something else. There was a reason he didn't want to think about it.

"I know where the lost ones go." Joy Joy leaped from the top of the water into an elegant curtsy. "Besides, where else would I go? You and I are tied as only we can be!"

Akira nodded through the lump in his throat. "Right. Thanks."

Joy-Joy laughed at him and Akira let her because it was something. Better than something.

* * *

 _ **A/N:** _Here I come inventing pairings no one's heard of again~! Enjoy!

Challenges: digiotpweek day 3, Novella Masterclass story/world 7 (fairytale retelling), three-sided box challenge, interseason boot camp - calendar, gameverse boot camp prompt - travel, diversity writing GG J32, easter egg advent day 25 (fairy tale retelling)


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two - Who Is Loved and Hated

Joy-Joy wakes him one night. He had been managing to sleep through the now familiar sound of his father coughing. The second her cold palm touches his bare shoulder, he is wide awake to look at an elegant red ceiling, painted with lines of cold in quick sharp strokes that spoke of how speedy battle could be. How ruthless and quick a real soldier was. How very easily he could have ended up dead.

Charming thought.

"Morning, bright boy," she says in a whisper. "It's time."

Akira nods and she steps away, vibrating as she shifts from one foot to the next. Her hair buns are up in messy curls, threatening to fall. His fingers itch to retie them.

Later, when they are ready. When they are gone and no one can stop them.

No one will. He has brothers and better candidates than he. He can profit from death. Or the family can at least.

He shakes those thoughts away and gets dressed. Old clothes, commoner clothes, he thinks. Or close enough to them. He's probably gonna be so obviously rich he'll be mugged within the hour. Well, if not for Joy-Joy who can probably kill people with her bare hands. She stands stock still, turned away, as he grabs everything he needs to help himself make it through this journey, as well as a knife too thin to hurt anyone except himself.

He must be prepared for the possibility that he will not be able to return.

And so in short, he leaves marching orders for the rest, for whether he returns or not. Akira sincerely doubts their necessity, of course. He's not particularly important at the moment. He has more competent siblings, much more realistic.

Still, if he's risking his life, he'd like to risk trying for his father, if nothing else.

Preparations complete, Akira joins her in padding out the door. He's learned from many late night runs on how to walk quietly and not disturb the night staff, not to wake his mother and brothers and sisters. He's learned everything he can. Even Patamon can flap silently in the night now. It's amazing how quickly digimon learn, especially the less talkative ones. He'd had to put V-mon away. He hoped the dragon would forgive him for it.

Joy-Joy pauses at the kitchens. "Wait here."

He does. As he does, his father coughs, loudly. It echoes down the hall and then all goes silent once more. Which makes his chest throb, for the silence and stillness. Before, people would fly out of the woodwork to appease the king and his sounds. Now there is only quiet, only indifference.

A king who a person ignores is not a king, merely a placeholder.

Determination surges in Akira's throat as Joy-Joy returns.

"Come on," she tells him, and because he trusts Joy-Joy, he follows.

The night is warm. It's the middle of spring after a soft rain. Even if they leave footprints, it will rain again and dissolve them all into mud once again. No one will find them. Even what cakes on their boots can be washed off.

As they walk into the trees, there is a low sound, a low song.

"Ah." Joy-Joy points. "An old bird is here."

A graying black bird regards them from a high tree branch. It opens its mouth and trills at them, low and sweet, dancing over their eardrums. Then, just as quickly, it takes off into the sky and out of sight.

"Well," Joy-Joy muses. "That's not exciting."

"I don't want to know," Akira tells her with a scowl as they set off again. She laughs at him.

He has to keep his composure, lest Bertran come out of the woodwork and cause their deaths.

* * *

Father comes home tired.

His wings look heavier than they did the day before. A little grayer at the feathers, a little more slow to land in a way that fits a great and regal creature like himself.

Yuuko presents herself at once, hugging him tight. "Welcome home, father," she says, chirpy as can be. Yuugo does not stand from his kneeling position immediately, giving his sister a few more moments with him alone. She'd always loved Father. It was a tad bit blind, but he couldn't blame her, he'd been able to simply raise her in a way he hadn't for Yuugo himself. Mother had had that role for both of them of course, but since her recent flight… well, he worries, is all.

His father opens a free arm and Yuugo rises in one smooth gesture into it. Only then does Yuugo risk a relieved smile, a gesture of love. Best his father only worries about one sensitive child.

 _Don't be stupid,_ whispers his sister in his heart.

 _That's me, your stupid brother._

 _Shut it._

He leads them to home, where the witch watches over her gloved fingers. She greets them easily, perfectly friendly and even sweet. But Kishibe Rie isn't that sweet, nor is she that soft, not in the end. She has to be nasty to draw the kings and queens away from the creatures they unintentionally preyed upon. She was hard to pin, but that was the point of her. She could do what mother couldn't, what father was too kind to do.

Even after the human man had caged him and whittled him down and away. He was still too kind, still too optimistic.

Rie affectionately calls them her family of fools. Yuugo can't disagree.

"The son is coming," Kamishiro Satoru says, once he's under quilts and settling in for dinner. "With a slave. His father smells ill."

The twins look at each other. "Isn't that… good?" Yuuko ventures. "That they are seeking us out then? Or that he's dying?"

"It's rather terrible if he finds you all," Rie points out, not gently exactly. She's not good at gentle with Yuuko. "He's as likely to make you a slave as he is to do nothing."

"He won't have Father," Yuugo says, staring at her. "I refuse. Not even for the Savior King."

The king who had made all the territories. The king who had swallowed the sky.

Rie smiles at him. "Do you intend to do something about him then?"

 _Do you intend to kill the boy-prince?_

Yuugo swallows his fear and his tongue for a second. "I have a plan," he says like she isn't a monster. "And it may not need you at all."

He pretends his father isn't ashen, that his sister isn't picking up the truths.

And that his mother isn't behind him, preparing to mourn too soon.


End file.
